David
MacRae is a software consultant who works out of his home in St.
Laurent, Quebec.

THE
CONTRARIAN

THE
ROOT CAUSES OF CRIME

by
David MacRae

Over the last fifty years, almost every country in Western Europe and North
America has experienced an enormous increase in crime rates. Neighborhoods
that once were safe at night have become dangerous during the day. Random
acts of violence, once almost unknown, have become common.

We have this notion that this is an American problem. It is not. While
Americans are definitely have a problem with murder, overall crime rates
are actually higher in many other countries including Canada, Great Britain,
France and Sweden. Certain kinds of violent crime are actually more common
elsewhere. Home invasions are far more common in Britain. The Montreal
area has recently experienced a rash of them, resulting in several deaths.
The good news is that rates seem to have stabilized in the nineties. The
bad news is that appears to be largely a demographic issue. Most perpetrators
of crime are young men. As the baby boom ages passes from its teens and
twenties into its forties and fifties, there are simply fewer people in
the appropriate group than there once were. But if you look in the places
where you find young people, you find that things are perhaps worse than
they ever were. High schools have turned from places of learning into armed
camps. Increasingly, girls are imitating their boyfriends and joining in
the party. There is a reason why teacher burnout rates are so high. Shell
shock.
Social conservatives tend to say that the reason for crime is criminals.
The answer therefore is longer sentences, the abolition of juvenile courts
and a return to the death penalty. While clearly we are all ultimately
responsible for our actions, this answer is unsatisfying. It does not explain
why crime has risen. Conservatives then answer that it is because of a
breakdown in moral values. Perhaps this is true, but it’s not an answer
either. Why did values break down?At
the root of the problem

Liberals (and here I use the word in its North American sense – as a euphemism
for socialists), answer that the reason for crime is « child
poverty » and « discrimination ».
Kids who come from « disadvantaged backgrounds
» are pre-disposed to anti-social behaviours. The answer therefore
is the same one that liberals always have to any problem: get the government
to spend more of other people’s money on it. Welfare, subsidized daycare.
You name it.
The idea that child poverty is responsible for crime has always been silly.
To start with, poverty (as opposed to squalor) has been virtually eliminated
in the Western world. Furthermore many countries in which real poverty
does exist, such as India and China, don't exhibit this social pathology.
The reality is that, aside from the industrialized West, crime is limited
to those areas of the world where the political and judicial system has
broken down such as Russia and most of sub-Saharan Africa. None of this
is very surprising when you consider that the human animal was designed
to live in a world where poverty, want and famine were the norm, not the
exception.
Yet for all this talk about the root causes of crime, there is one factor
which overwhelms all of the others: fatherlessness. The link between fatherlessness
and crime is so strong « that controlling for family
configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between
low income and crime », as Barbara Defoe Whitehead notes
in her famous article from Atlantic Monthly« Dan
Quayle was Right ».

« In 1983, the US Department of Health and Human Services found that
60% of child abuse is inflicted by mothers with sole custody of their children.
Almost all of the rest comes from other members of her entourage, especially
boyfriends and second husbands. »

Consider these facts:

85% of
all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes
(U.S. Center for Disease Control);

90% of
all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes (U.S. Bureau
of the Census);

85% of
all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home (Texas Dept.
of Corrections 1992).

In fact, you can pick a social ill at random and you will find that the
correlation with fatherlessness is clear and direct. Depression. Suicide.
Dropping out of school. Teenage pregnancy. Drug use. In sum, fatherless
children are:

Fatherless children are also, according to one British study, about 33
times more likely to be abused. In 1983, the US Department of Health and
Human Services found that 60% of child abuse is inflicted by mothers with
sole custody of their children. Almost all of the rest comes from other
members of her entourage, especially boyfriends and second husbands.
Under these circumstances, you would think that there would be an enormous
amount of research under way in an attempt to understand what is happening.
The media would be demanding answers. Are men abandoning their children,
as is commonly supposed, or are they being forced out? Or simply treated
as a convenient source of sperm? How does child support affect the issue?
Is there a difference between unwed and divorced mothers? Is there a difference
between welfare mothers and the others? How does continued father contact
affect things? Is there an identifiable group of single mothers who do
significantly better than others – or significantly worse? And most of
all, why do single father families not exhibit the same sort of pathology?
But nothing happens. On the contrary, the facts are suppressed. Facts
or propaganda

A few days ago (June 7), an article appeared in La Presse summarizing
a telephone survey in which the Quebec Health Ministry asked 2469 mothers
about child abuse in their families. Various correlations are made between
child abuse and mother tongue (!), between child abuse and family size,
between child abuse and poverty. Yet family structure is never mentioned
once. Nor is welfare. Furthermore, we never learn who is actually performing
this abuse. The article uses contorted constructions in the passive voice
to avoid the topic such as: « 79% des enfants ont
vécu de “l’agression psychologique” au moins une fois pendant l’année
» (quotes in the original). It’s also interesting to note
that the word « parent » appears eight times in
the article, including the title, always without specifying who it refers
to. « Mother » only appears three times, always
when talking about who was surveyed. « Father »
does not appear at all.
The ambiguities in La Presse’s article merely reflect those in the
survey itself. Whole sentences are taken directly from the government’s
press release. It is remarkable to see how poorly this survey is designed.
Of course, it is pretty clear that it is really a propaganda tool, not
an attempt to understand child abuse. Let’s take a look at it.
To start with, father-only households are simply ignored. The premise of
the survey is that we only talk to women so this family-type is simply
wished out of existence. At least the combination of father and stepmother
is considered. There, after all, we find a woman in the house who we can
talk to. With perhaps more justification, other families without a mother
are all lumped together (although it is well-known that grandmothers supply
far better care to children than foster mothers).
Worse than this, the survey makes no distinction whatever between different
types of parents, fathers vs. mothers or natural parents vs. step-parents.
All questions simply refer to parents. What is the point of a survey about
child abuse which doesn’t ask about who is doing the abusing? No wonder,
La Presse mixes them up!
It is well known that children of violent parents are significantly more
likely to be violent towards their own children; we learn our parenting
techniques from our own parents. In an attempt to quantify this relationship,
the survey also asks whether the mother’s own parents (and those of her
spouse, if any) were ever violent towards a sister, brother or mother.
Note that the possibility of violence towards the father is specifically
excluded. This being so, it is unsurprising that the survey finds fathers
to be about 50% more violent than mothers.
What is surprising is that the mother’s own parents are found to be much
more violent than those of her partner! This amazing fact is supplied without
comment. Imagine it. The parents of women are more violent than those of
men. This despite the fact that the survey also finds that boys are more
likely to be victims of familial violence than girls. Perhaps it might
be worthwhile talking to Mr. Partner the next time around
to find out why this might be. Maybe his perception of his relationship
with his parents might be different than that of an outsider.
Finally, the survey does ask the mothers about family structure but nowhere
in any of the 124 pages of the report does it make any comments about how
this affects the results. It seems almost self-evident that stepfamilies
would either be better or worse situations than mother-only ones. There
are simply too many differences for the two to be the same. Yet no comment
is made whatsoever. One can only ask why.
The report does make one and only one recommendation: that the survey be
repeated every three years in order to « educate »
parents about child abuse. The bureaucratic instinct strikes again! Perhaps
it’s time to start asking the right questions instead of repeating the
same old ones.